Neil Armstrong left the first footprint on the moon, on July 20, 1969. But what about Earth — when did animals first leave footprints here?

While we don't know exactly when animals first left tracks on our planet, the oldest footprints ever found were left between 551 million and 541 million years ago during the Ediacaran period, a new study finds. That's hundreds of millions of years before dinosaurs started roaming Earth, about 245 million years ago. The new findings suggest animals evolved primitive "arms" and "legs" earlier than previously thought.

The first African fossils of Devonian tetrapods (four-legged vertebrates) show these pioneers of land living within the Antarctic circle, 360 million years ago.

The evolution of tetrapods from fishes during the Devonian period was a key event in our distant ancestry. Newly found fossils from the latest Devonian Waterloo Farm locality near Grahamstown in the Eastern Cape, South Africa, published today in Science, force a major reassessment of this event

Fossils representing two new species of saber-toothed prehistoric predators have been described by researchers from the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences (Raleigh, USA) and the Vyatka Paleontological Museum (Kirov, Russia). These new species improve the scientists' understanding of an important interval in the early evolution of mammals—a time, between mass extinctions, when the roles of certain carnivores changed drastically.

For 100 million years, amber freezes a tableau of Burmese bugs’ life-and-death struggle

One day in Myanmar during the Cretaceous period, a tick managed to ensnare itself in a spider web. Realizing its predicament, the tick struggled to get free. But the spider that built the web was having none of it. The spider popped over to the doomed tick and quickly wrapped it up in silk, immobilizing it for eternity.

Four amber-preserved specimens of Electrorana were acquired in the area of Angbamo in Kachin Province of northern Myanmar in 2015.

They provide the earliest direct evidence of frogs living in a wet tropical forest ecosystem and are oldest-known examples of frogs preserved in amber, with the only two previous reports from Cenozoic amber deposits of the Dominican Republic.

New sources of melanin pigment shake up ideas about fossil animals’ colour

A rethink of how scientists reconstruct the color of fossil birds, reptiles, and dinosaurs.

Numerous ongoing investigations of fossil color have expected that fossilized granules of melanin – melanosomes – originate from the skin. In any case, new confirmation demonstrates that different tissues–, for example, the liver, lungs, and spleen – can likewise contain melanosomes, recommending that fossil melanosomes may not give data on fossil color.

These half-billion-year-old creatures were animals—but unlike any known today

So-called Ediacaran organisms have puzzled biologists for decades. To the untrained eye they look like fossilized plants, in tube or frond shapes up to 2 meters long. These strange life forms dominated Earth’s seas half a billion years ago, and scientists have long struggled to figure out whether they’re algae, fungi, or even an entirely different kingdom of life that failed to survive. Now, two paleontologists think they have finally established the identity of the mysterious creatures: They were animals, some of which could move around, but they were unlike any living on Earth today.

99-million-year-old beetle trapped in amber served as pollinator to evergreen cycads

Flowering plants are well known for their special relationship to the insects and other animals that serve as their pollinators. But, before the rise of angiosperms, another group of unusual evergreen gymnosperms, known as cycads, may have been the first insect-pollinated plants. Now, researchers reporting in the journal Current Biology on August 16 have uncovered the earliest definitive fossil evidence of that intimate relationship between cycads and insects.

Scientists have found new evidence confirming that turtles once lived without shells.

The almost-complete fossil dates back 228 million years and is bigger than a double bed.

It was discovered in the Guizhou province of south west China

Dr Nicholas Fraser, keeper of natural sciences at the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh, said: "It looked like a turtle but then lacked everything of the shell underneath and also the one on top."

A meticulous examination of over 1,500 fly pupae fossils has resulted in the discovery of four new species of ancient parasitic wasps, dating back to between 66 million and 23 million years ago in what is now France.

New research published today in Nature Communications offers the first definitive proof of parasitic behavior among wasps, or more accurately, the first definitive proof of endoparasitism among wasps, in which the parasite (like a wasp pupae or tapeworm) develops or lives inside its host.

By the time non-avian dinosaurs went extinct, plant-eating sauropods like the Brontosaurus had grown to gargantuan proportions. Weighing in as much as 100 tons, the long-neck behemoths are the largest land animals to ever walk the earth.

How they grew so large from ancestors that were small enough to be found in a modern-day petting zoo has remained a mystery. A new, in-depth anatomical description of the best preserved specimens of a car-sized sauropod relative from North America could help paleontologists with unraveling the mystery.

Two years ago, researchers from the University of Wollongong in Australia shook the science world by claiming to have discovered 3.7 billion-year-old fossils in a rock formation in Greenland, a finding that pushed back the origin of life on Earth by 200 million years. New research is now casting doubt on this discovery, with scientists saying the rock structures are of non-biological origin.

In the original 2016 study, geologist Allen Nutman and colleagues identified cone-like structures, ranging between 1 and 4 centimeters in length, in 3.7-billion-year-old rock found in the Isua formation in southwest Greenland.